Portal creator's latest lives up to its pedigree.

Game Details

Developer: Airtight GamesPublisher: Square EnixPlatforms PC (reviewed), Xbox 360 and PS3 (coming later this summer)Release Date: June 21, 2012ESRB Rating: EPrice: $14.99Purchase Link:SteamAs the designer of Portal, Kim Swift has done more than anyone in recent memory to turn the first-person puzzle platform into a popular genre with a proven base of support. But Portal's groundbreaking success means that Swift's latest first-person puzzle platform game, Quantum Conundrum, comes saddled with the weight of hefty expectations. Luckily for her, the game meets those expectations with aplomb using a mix of original mechanics and strong, clever puzzle design.

If only the game's story were as interesting. Quantum Conundrum starts by unceremoniously dropping its five-year-old protagonist off at the sprawling mansion of his wacky uncle, Professor Quadwrangle. Quadwrangle seems to have found himself trapped in a mysterious pocket dimension with no memory of how he got there. Luckily, Professor Q is still able to see his nephew and communicate with him through an intercom, letting him serve the genre-standard role of disembodied vocal guide (in fact, he often seems a bit too eager to pipe up with hints on how to get through puzzles before the player has had a chance to work them out).

The writing is characterized by a kind of forced wackiness, stringing together a series of bad puns and awkward non-sequiturs that never really come together to give a strong sense of character or place. The uneven, somewhat phoned-in delivery by John de Lancie (perhaps best known as Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation) doesn't help the impact of lines that generally feel like they're striving to be clever without ever achieving their goal. The game's overarching plot also feels like it's trying to be grander than it is. After being bombarded with unsubtle hints about a big revelatory twist coming at the end of the game, the final unveiling was severely underwhelming.

Enlarge/ Flying safes and recliners are a lot less scary when they're in the pillow-esque "fluffy dimension."

But the cleverness that is largely lacking in Quantum Conundrum's writing and story is more than covered by the actual first-person puzzle design that forms the core of the gameplay. Quantum Conundrum's puzzles are all built around the ability to shift between four alternate dimensions, each of which alters one physical or temporal element of the world around you. One dimension makes all the objects around you light and fluffy so you can easily lift heavy safes or blow them around the room with giant fans. Another makes everything in the room exceptionally heavy so even a flimsy cardboard box can be used to break through a window. There's also a dimension that slows down time, which primarily aids you in making tricky jumps between fast-moving flying objects, and a dimension that reverses gravity, letting you lift objects toward the ceiling or ride them to higher platforms.

The game metes out the introduction of each new dimension slowly through the game, leading to intermittent tutorial sections filled with insultingly easy, one-dimensional puzzles (see what I did there?). But the vast majority of the game's puzzles end up forcing you to use the four simple dimensional shifts in some surprising and unexpected ways. One early puzzle, for example, seems to require the impossible, simultaneous combination of the light and heavy dimensions to get two safes into the correct position. Then you realize that a giant fan means the light versions of those safes can be stacked horizontally just as easily as they can be stacked vertically. Other puzzles are more than willing to limit your use of certain dimensions in many rooms, changing a situation that would be incredibly simple into one that requires some real lateral thinking to figure out a new, less direct solution.

Then there are the puzzles that require interesting combinations of different dimensional shifts. As the game progresses, you'll learn how to hurl barriers in front of deadly lasers (by combining the fluffy and heavy dimensions), play catch with yourself over long distances (by combining the fluffy and slow-motion dimensions), and carefully control impromptu elevators (reverse-gravity plus time-slowing). One common trick used frequently in the second half of the game involves throwing a light object in the fluffy dimension, transferring over to the slow motion dimension to hop on top of it, then toggling the gravity back and forth to ride that object in a sort of sine wave across long gaps. It's a technique you'll end up using constantly, and one that you'll have to constantly tweak with new knowledge as additional puzzles change the parameters slightly.

While figuring out how to manipulate the world to get around apparent problems is incredibly satisfying, actually executing that manipulation is often quite frustrating. There were quite a few rooms that I figured out how to solve quite quickly, but ended up repeating dozens of times just because I couldn't get the timing of a particular jump down precisely enough. The first-person viewpoint doesn't help much here—I missed quite a few jumps just because I couldn't accurately gauge my momentum or see my feet to know precisely where I was going to land. The game is quite forgiving with checkpoints and quick restarts, minimizing the penalty for failure, but the control problems still end up getting in the way of the pleasant puzzle solving. (While using a gamepad made it easier to quickly shift between dimensions and precisely place jumps, turning seemed painfully slow compared to the mouse-keyboard setup).

Quantum Conundrum also runs into the common puzzle-platform game problem of ending just as it's starting to really come together. By the end of my six-hour or so playthrough, I was just beginning to see the kinds of puzzles that compellingly combined the use of all four dimensions in ways that required me to use all of the skills I had been learning for the entire game up to that point. There's some limited replay value in the hunt for hidden robots scattered in out-of-the-way places, and challenges to finish rooms quickly and with as few dimensional shifts and deaths as possible. The real joy in the game is figuring out the out-of-the-box puzzle's solutions, though, so going back to struggle with the imprecise platforming wasn't incredibly compelling.

Hopefully upcoming downloadable content will extend the world of Quantum Conundrum a little further, adding more interesting twists on the basic mechanics. I'd have bought those puzzle packs as soon as I finished the game if they were they available, just to satisfy my brain's continuing desire to work itself around what at first seemed like utterly impossible problems.

The Good

Unique mechanic involving shifting the physical rules of the universe.

Strong puzzle design that requires inventive use of established mechanics.

Indirect puzzle solutions that demand outside-the-box thinking.

Bright, compelling visual style that is full of life.

The Bad

Writing that is trying a little too hard to be clever.

Underwhelming plot that doesn't deliver on promised twist.

First-person controls that make simple platforming tasks difficult.

The Ugly

Game ends somewhat abruptly just as it's hitting its most interesting puzzles.

Verdict: Buy It

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl

I really want to like this game, but I'm extremely put off by the setting, art, story, and execution. The ideas all seem to be there, and I get excited when I read about the game, but every time I watch a gameplay video I very quickly lose interest.

I know with Portal I was absolutely hooked the moment I saw the very first teaser--it grabbed me immediately. With this game, though, I'm just not feeling the love.

Simply because it's from the designer of Portal I'm compelled to throw money at it. Those games were crazy good. And smart puzzle gaming is so intensely satisfying next to a lot of the mindless titles released lately.

Maybe I missed it, but what's the point in telling us the review PC specs if there is no comment on the game performance? Knowing what PC you reviewed it on is irrelevant if I don't know how it performed in that review. I assume it was adequate, otherwise you'd say, but it seems a bit odd to have your specs and not (for example) the required specs.

This does sound like a buy - based on the Portal pedigree. Not sure why the $15 price point feels high though. Guess I'm expecting $10 for something like this.

I believe it was on prepurchase for $12.50 or $13.50 during E3. I'm sure it will be on sale during Steam's Christmas sale.

Quote:

Hopefully upcoming downloadable content will extend the world of Quantum Conundrum a little further, adding more interesting twists on the basic mechanics.

My mind keeps reading that as "Hopefully the DLC adds content to the game" which seems to be the point of DLC. Unless it's horse armor, I guess. I think it's how I'm parsing this. "adding more [interesting twists on the basic mechanics]" sounds like more content. So it must be "adding [more interesting] twists on the basic mechanics." meaning clever-er-er puzzles.

Maybe I missed it, but what's the point in telling us the review PC specs if there is no comment on the game performance? Knowing what PC you reviewed it on is irrelevant if I don't know how it performed in that review. I assume it was adequate, otherwise you'd say, but it seems a bit odd to have your specs and not (for example) the required specs.

it's based on ue3 and going to be multiplatform, so not like it's going to be demanding enough to matter.other pc details found elsewhere:

- no graphic/fov settings- locked @ 60fps- forced vsync

so a standard port job. but again ue3, so you can edit all this yourself anyway if you want to mess with configs. I suspect those touchy platforming issues mentioned in the review would play much better with a proper fov, it's probably overly constricted by default.